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Asked by gnun2175 to Tomasz, Matt, Dave, Aoife, Anzy on 12 Nov 2013.
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David Christensen answered on 12 Nov 2013:
That could be a very big question gnun2175, but I’ll try to be brief.
Our bodies are made up of a huge number of cells of a lot of different types. We have lots of different types of cells that make up our hearts and a lot of very different cells that make up our brains and then lots of different cells throughout all of the rest of our body (blood, bone, muscles, skin, liver, kidney, lungs, stomach, etc). We can see that organs have specific functions – the heart pumps blood, the brain sends signals around the body to control movement and allows us to think about this, our muscles respond to the brain by moving when they are told, our stomachs work to digest our food, and so on.
The individual cells that make up organs work to allow that organ to do what it needs to do. In the heart, all of the cells move slightly to make a much bigger movement as the heart beats. In the kidney, all of the cells are working to filter the blood and produce urine. In the brain, nerve cells are sending electrical signals to each other to communicate and send messages across the body.
When we have cells growing on a plate in the lab, they are not part of an organ, but they will still do the sorts of things they would do if they were in an organ. This is how we can understand and learn about what cells do in our bodies. We can look at how the cells react when we treat them differently to find out more about how the cells communicate to each other in the body and how diseases affect what the cells do.
I hope this answers your question! Please ask another question if my answer here doesn’t help!
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Matthew Tomlinson answered on 14 Nov 2013:
gnun2175, that is a tough question and Dave has given a great answer. There are whole textbooks written about how a cell works and for things that are so small they really are very complicated.
Basically a human cell is a sac (the cell membrane) filled with fluid (the cytoplasm) containing things called organelles. These organelles do different things in the cell. The nucleus contains most of the DNA and this is where the genetic information is stored. DNA gets read and converted into RNA and this RNA is then read by things called ribosomes which make proteins. These proteins then get moved to another organelle called the endoplasmic reticulum where the proteins get assembled before being sent to the Golgi complex where they get modified and sent to where they are needed. Also in the cell are things called mitochondria that make energy and something called the cytoskeleton which senses movement. The cells receive chemical signals from other cells through the membrane which tells it which proteins it needs to make.
I think that is pretty much the basics of how a cell works!
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